A Single Thestral Tail Hair
by artemisian
Summary: In the summer before his fourteenth year, a new player arrives onto Magical England's political scene. The precious nephew of the esteemed Lord Potter, the lost Peverell Heir ... all wrapped up in a beautifully powerful package that Tom Marvolo Riddle wishes to covet for reasons unknown to even him. AU. TMR/HP.


Disclaimer: Don't own anything but the fic idea/writing

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Summary: In the summer before his fourteenth year, a new player arrives onto Magical England's political scene. The precious nephew of the esteemed Lord Potter, the lost Peverell Heir ... all wrapped up in a beautifully powerful package that Tom Marvolo Riddle wishes to covet for reasons unknown to even him. AU. TMR/HP.

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I've had this idea in my head for _ages_, and I just decided I needed to write it out and get it over with.

Basically, this is one of those cliche fics where Harry is born in TMR's era - it started as Harry being a bastard child of the Potter lord and it morphed into this ... Harry is the son of the Potter lord's younger twin sister, the sister that ran away to France after she and her parents had a disagreement regarding her betrothed. She finds a husband there and has a child, never reconciling with her parents or her family. Her son, Harry, eventually does so after his parents death. And then the rest is sort of cliche.

Harry meets the Potters and enrolls in Hogwarts against the backdrop of Grindewald rising to power. He meets Tom and ... gay things ... happen.

This chapter is only the prologue and its sort of just to get the story started, as it has a a lot of background info and such. The next chapter will pick up with dialogue and more descriptions. Harry won't meet the Potters till the third or fourth chapter, and won't meet Tom until later than even that.

I'm going to try to have Harry Peverell have as many parallels to Harry Potter from canon as possible, but this story _is _an AU, so who knows how many parallels there will be. On that note! There _will_ be many things in this fic that don't match up perfectly to canon, again this story _is_ an AU, so I don't aim on following canon precisely.

Warnings: N/A for this chapter.

Pairings: Endgame TMR/HP.

_**I'm going to try to update this fic every two or three**_** weeks.**

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Prologue: The End of a Quiet Life

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They first get word that someone is looking to conquer the Elder wand when Harry is thirteen, and his father – Aloysius Peverell, the then current master of said wand – hadn't been too worried about such a thing occurring, too prideful to even _consider_ someone besting him in a duel. He was, after all, the first Peverell to hold the wand after its original master, as he'd dueled the previous master before his magical majority and he'd held the wand ever since.

It's instead Harry's mother, Lucretia Peverell née Potter who insists that they go into hiding, worry creasing her brow even as she tries to smile and hide her nervousness. She had always been exceptionally paranoid, especially regarding Harry's health – who was her only child.

Perhaps stemming from remaining anxiousness over having left her family before _her_ magical majority and running off to France, mostly in part to escape her betrothed and her parents. She didn't kept in contact with her family for obvious reasons, but she was always so very worried some relation of hers would come to spirit her son away to make him the Potter heir.

The worries were probably unfounded – she was the younger twin sister of the first born son and it was likely he already had a child, but Harry would never dare to tell his mother such a thing and allows her to fuss over him, coddling him even at _thirteen_.

Both of the Peverell men were weak to Lucretia's will and while Harry allows his mother to spoil and care for him, his father fulfills his mother's every desire for the simple pleasure of making the woman smile. And so Aloysius arranges for them to move to the Peverell summer cottage, calling upon a close family friend to place a Fidelis ward on the property. Secretly, he's absolutely certain that there's nary a wizard in France or beyond that could best him in a duel, but he realizes that such a belief could very well be his downfall, so he completes his wife's wishes with barely a bitter thought.

As for Harry, he's never been too attached to the opulence of the Peverell manor. Even though the Peverells didn't originate in France, the manor had a few marked similarities to many other French pureblood properties. There was a charmed garden maze that led to the front door with many statues nestled in the various dead ends. The entire property was a few thousand kilometers and it included a lake and a Quidditch pitch, as well as a guest house and a miniature forest.

The inside of the manor was lavish and decked out in the wizarding equivalent of Baroque furniture, in which the busy designs and patterns were charmed to move nonsensically and sluggishly. Having such furniture was considered a status symbol among the French purebloods, but again – Harry had never cared for such a thing. Looking at the patterns writhing and twisting for too long never failed to give him a headache.

Although leaving his childhood home for any amount of time left him with a bitter sense of nostalgia, at the same time Harry craved the clean simplicity of his family's summer cottage, mostly in part due to the fact that his _mother_ had decorated the property and there was a blessed lack of charmed patterned furniture.

And it wasn't as if the move would actually _affect_ him – he was continuing his third year at Beauxbatons, as the school was likely even more secure than a Fidelis charmed cottage and he needed to continue his schooling, as well as his extracurricular training. Harry had inherited the magical sensitivity that the Peverells were somewhat famed for, which manifested in part in empathy, in another in being able to see uncasted magic as it swirled around its owner. Although he wasn't nearly strong enough to influence other people's emotions, he was incredibly sensitive to other people's emotions and the weight of their magic. The flitting and heavy sensations were often enough to give him a headache, but since starting his schooling and training, his migraines had _thankfully_ been happening in a less frequent manner.

And perhaps Harry had been too naïve to even consider the fact that his family went into hiding because of actual _danger _instead of his mother's anxiety, too trusting in his father's ability and dueling prowess – but years later, he wishes he'd hugged and kissed his parents goodbye before leaving for school. That he'd allowed his mother to clutch him close to her chest – instead of embarrassingly and stiffly half-reciprocated to quell the inevitable dressing down he'd get if he didn't. That he'd at least hugged his father – that he'd begged to stay with them instead of leaving.

Because the next time he'd see his parents, they'd be lifeless on the reception room floor, and he'd have lost any chance to say 'I love you' even one last time.

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_Fin_ .. (for now)

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The next chapter will be Harry finding his parents, as well as finding instructions to be acted upon his parent's death.

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I'm artemiiiiis over on tumblr! A link is on my profile, so you should follow me if you want to see more ridiculousness.

Review if you like! Tell me how I did, maybe? Also, positive feedback and concrit will definitely inspire me to write more and update faster (maybe)!


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